If you're wondering where emoticons and emojis are coming from, this is a nice little piece about that.

Interesting historical look at how and why modal editing appeared.

What's behind the notion? Some historical musing about self-organizing teams and the design they produce.

Excellent profile of Tim Berners-Lee.

Go and read it! It'll give a lively impression of the Web early history. It's amazing how, back then, he managed to fend of the greed of corporate interests in order to make sure his original vision would survive. Of course not everything materialized, most notably the Semantic Web (sadly).

Nowadays, the real question is the fragmentation due to the big closed platforms power grab and the political context. Can we still save the Web? For sure there's no clear path yet.

A tiny piece of history which was instrumental in the way the web and email developed back then.

Interesting exploration of where the strong verb system of the English language is coming from.

Ever wondered about how Windows 3 was architectured? This is an interesting read. It was really complex though, you can really tell it's in the middle of several transitions.

Or why the XML roots of the web are important to keep in shape. I'm not necessarily in love with how verbose XML is, but it's been a great enabler for interoperability. That's indeed the latter reason which pushed Google to try to get rid of it as much as possible.

A talk from Casey Muratori who is pushing his ideas on software architecture. This one is very interesting on the long history detour it does. Shows well how we keep rediscovering stuff which sometimes go back to the early times of computer science.

Interesting exploration about where the alphabet comes from. Interesting debate about the abjad vs alphabet classification in the comments as well.

Very interesting article. Where diacritics come from? Why English doesn't have them?

This is a lovely idea I think. Good way to pay homage to lost ones.

It is indeed much easier nowadays to preserve produced content. We have so many open and simple formats to choose from. It's not always been like this.

A reminder that the technique goes back to way before XP.

Ever realized raccoons had something to do with the history of computing? And children illustrations? Work of art if you ask me... we have to get back to the time of the computer magazines.

Very nice account of the history behind vi and vim. Also some special mentions of Emacs and why it has such a different lineage.

Are we sure the Moomins are really a cute tale? I always felt them slightly off, but indeed it goes much darker than I suspected.

This paper is a look back at SCCS. This is nice to see how much progress was made in version control systems since then, it's also interesting to see how the design choices changed.

Interesting rambling and exploration. What would a computer built to last a century look like?

Once again the music labels can't understand the cultural value of building archives. Let's hope they loose the lawsuit.